The family of Harry Dunn, a British motorcyclist killed by an American woman with diplomatic immunity, says she may have been using her phone while driving. They are determined to unravel the case, their spokesman told RT.
“When you kill somebody abroad, you face the consequences of your actions and you do the right thing,” Radd Seiger said. “And this issue is never going to go away, until the US government realizes that there is a broken-hearted bereft family here.”
Dunn, who was 19 at the time, was killed in August 2019 when he was hit by a car driven on the wrong side of the road by American citizen Anne Sacoolas near the RAF Croughton base in Northamptonshire. She and her husband, a CIA officer, were living at the base, which hosts a US listening post. She claimed diplomatic immunity and fled the UK, even as the British justice system charged her with causing death by reckless driving.
The Dunn family has been seeking justice for their son ever since. Shielded by her status, the US has refused to extradite Sacoolas for a criminal trial in the UK, and she has refused to return and face it voluntarily. A civilian case was launched against her in the US, which at the moment appears to be the only venue for justice available to the British family. The trial is expected to begin later this year.
Court papers filed by the family’s lawyers on Monday pointed to the absence of records from Sacoolas’ phone from the time of the incident and called her remarks about the case “evasive, non-responsive and inconsistent.” It led them to believe that she may have been distracted by the device at the moment she hit Harry.
“This is about a search for the truth,” Seiger told RT. “We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the phone issue in the US civil case for the last three months.”
Earlier, the US government filed a motion to keep the court from learning details about Sacoolas’ job details. Like her husband, she was working for the US government in the UK, but it remains unclear in what capacity.
There is suspicion that her employer was also the CIA and that her status as an intelligence agent was not known to the British government. If she truly was an undisclosed spy, it would further complicate the situation, particularly putting into question her claim of diplomatic immunity.
It would also imply that she may not be at liberty to submit herself to trial in the UK, which, Seiger said, “she should have done a long time ago.” Some details of the case – like Sacoolas and her husband discarding their phones and sim cards on return to the US, as described in court papers – could be seen as following cloak-and-dagger rules.
The US government motion to keep her working arrangements under wraps was filed under a national security justification.
The conflict over the killing of Harry Dunn is a rare example of an issue dividing the US and the UK, longtime close allies. It was discussed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden ahead of the G7 summit hosted by the UK in June.
Johnson said Biden, who lost his first wife and their one-year-old daughter in a car crash in 1972, was “extremely sympathetic” to the pain of the Dunn family. However, the prime minister added that there were limits to what Biden could do.
Seiger said the family hopes that “there is going to be a criminal trial here in the UK with Mrs. Sacoolas participating in it sooner rather than later.”
